31. A New Tradition

31

A NEW TRADITION

brISTOL

W here the hell did Lila go? I’ve left her ten voicemails, blown up her phone with about thirty text messages, and tried tracking her location only for the stupid fucking app to glitch out on me. I don’t know where she is. She was right here twenty minutes ago.

I thought I was stupid for thinking she’d up and left—until I noticed that her car wasn’t parked outside anymore. And now she could be anywhere out in this storm, and weather officials can’t predict when the forecast will clear up. My mind’s conjuring the worst-case scenarios right now. One, she’s trapped somewhere in the snow in need of rescue. Two, she spun out on the road because of the ice and flipped her car. Or three—and the possibility that I don’t even want to fucking consider—she’s dead somewhere because of the weather or the road or my text messages.

I shouldn’t have even waited twenty minutes. I should’ve gotten off my ass and gone to find her the moment I discovered she was missing. I know Big Bear better than she does—I’ve vacationed here a lot with my family. Oh my God, I feel sick to my stomach. If Lila was in trouble, I’d be the first person she’d text. But she hasn’t. She’s gone radio silent on me. The only time I’ve ever been this worried before was…right before Summit died.

My heart rate’s rocking a one-thirty BPM right now, and my mental sirens are doing a piss-poor job of patching the holes in my now-fragile defenses—holes that welcome a torrent of inconsolable worries.

I need to find her. I need to find her now .

I fumble for my car keys, making a gigantic ruckus in the foyer, and my mother intercepts my nonsensible one-man rescue mission before I even get the chance to make it outside. Concern is scrawled over her tightly wound features as she gives me a wide berth, hesitant to approach me like I’ll bolt if she tries getting any closer.

“Bristol, you can’t go out in this weather,” she says softly, wrapping herself tighter in her sweater.

My dad nods solemnly. “Your mom’s right. You’re putting yourself in danger if you get behind the wheel. You have a pretty good chance of getting into an accident with the current road conditions.”

Tears come to a boil behind my eyes, and each one of their unwanted opinions feels like steel wool scrubbing against an open wound. “Lila’s out there, right now, all by herself. I’m not leaving her. If she’s in trouble and can’t call for help, I’m her only hope.”

My mom steps the tiniest bit closer to me. “I know you want to help her, but what good will you be to her if you end up getting hurt?”

I can’t believe they can’t see where I’m coming from. Lila’s my responsibility. I’m the reason she’s even here in the first place. This isn’t some sit-down discussion I’m willing to have with them. I’m not asking for their fucking permission to go save my future wife .

“I don’t care what happens to me! I’ll walk on foot if you’re so worried about me getting into an accident. I’m not going to stop until I find her. What part of that don’t you understand?”

My father comes between me and my mother, acting as some immovable force. “You’re irrational right now. I know you care about this girl, son, but do you really think you can cover Big Bear walking on foot? Hell, she could be anywhere. The best we can do is call the snow patrol and offer them assistance from here.”

“So if Mom was stuck out in the snow, you’d just leave her? You’d just sit by and do nothing? You’re seriously telling me that you’d wait for the snow patrol to start their search when you could’ve been searching for her the whole time? She could be freezing. She could be scared. Is that not enough incentive for you?” I’m screaming now, flying off the rails like a runaway train careening off a broken track, and the little scrap of hope still inside me has been crushed beyond recognition.

My mother’s on the brink of tears, looking up at my father for guidance, her small frame cowering behind him. All my dad does is stare down at me, and even though I can’t immediately place his expression, disappointment fills in the empty blank for me.

“I’m not losing anyone else,” I choke out, more than ready to fight my way into the snow if that’s what it takes. I know I’m not thinking clearly right now. I have no business getting behind the wheel when I’m this emotional, regardless of the weather. I’ll probably contract hypothermia if I’m out in the snow too long. And as much as I hate to admit that my dad’s right, I’m just one person. I can’t cover all of Big Bear by myself.

But none of that matters. The only person who matters right now is out there, God knows where, all alone. I don’t care about the fight. I just need to find her .

My father holds out his hand. “Give me your car keys, Bristol.”

I swallow down a mouthful of hot vomit. “I…can’t.”

“Son, please .”

The metal edges of my keys dig craters into my palms, and the tears slip silently down my cheeks as my shoulders begin to shake. I feel my fingers slacken before I even register what I’m doing, guilt sitting in the bottom of my stomach like quick-drying concrete.

LILA

I don’t know how much time has passed, but the adrenaline has started to fade. I’m bound to freeze even in my puffer jacket, and I’ll be lucky if the engine or the headlights haven’t already attracted whatever is out there lurking in the darkness.

Bristol’s playlist has kept me sane for the most part. I’ll keep listening to it until my phone runs out of battery—which is probably going to be soon. So I stay curled up in my malformed half-circle, parts of the passenger seat notching uncomfortably against my spine, and I fold all of my limbs underneath my shivering body.

If I die out here, Bristol, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ran. I’m sorry I didn’t try and fix things like I should’ve. I constantly judged you for the way you handled things, and now I’m no better. Running is easier—painless, almost. And after you’ve dealt with a lifetime of pain, I don’t blame you for wanting to escape.

I’m losing cognizance faster than California loses daybreak in December. I’m so tired. I just want to go to sleep. I want my brain to be quiet. Maybe I’ll wake up in a better place, or maybe I’ll wake up in Bristol’s arms. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? To be back at his cabin, huddled around the fireplace, hearing his laughter echo into the night.

My eyelids slowly droop closed, and I let all of the anger and the fear and the sadness go.

And then, in the fogginess of my imagination, I hear a knock. I don’t know what I’m dreaming about, but Bristol must be at the door. Maybe I’m remembering all the times he showed up to my apartment for fancy date nights or casual movie marathons—all the times my heart waited nervously for him to come back and see me.

Rap, rap, rap.

He’d always knock three times. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the way he was raised—to be assertive but not insistent. Bristol was always too polite for his own good, but I loved that about him. It’s hard to find someone like that in this day and age.

Rap, rap, rap.

Okay, Dream Bristol. I get it. It’s a dream. You can just come on in.

RAP. RAP. RAP.

There’s muffled shouting, the car’s shaking, and that’s when I realize I’m not imagining things. With a racing pulse, I scramble away from the door, panickily searching for anything I can use as a makeshift weapon…until I realize through a bleary haze that my intruder isn’t an intruder at all.

Bristol’s banging on the car’s carapace with red, puffy eyes, and I work hastily to pop the back seat door open. His mountainous body enters the vehicle without hesitation, and his arms are the first thing I feel when he embraces me, accompanied by a sizeable dusting of snowflakes.

“I found you. Thank God I found you. ”

How did he—? Am I sure I’m not imagining this?

He squeezes me tighter than ever before, as if letting go isn’t a fate he’s willing to face. “I thought I’d lost you. I thought you were—I thought you were gone for good.” His throat protests a wounded sound, and it stings as badly as lemon juice trickling into a fresh cut.

I immediately withdraw from him and click on the overhead light, which highlights the aftermath of tears on his face in a rinse of gold. I lose myself in his gaze like I always do—eyes the color of melted Ghirardelli squares and pupils blown wide, leaving behind the rings of his irises. He’s so beautiful that I don’t know how God could’ve created something so pure.

“Bristol…”

“Lila, I…” There’s an underpinning of shame in his voice, and he struggles to get the words out like there’s a hand curled around his windpipe. “I fucked up. I fucked up, and I’m so fucking sorry.”

I torture my bottom lip with my teeth, already feeling the tears circle back and start to tease my waterlines. “No, Bristol. I’m the one who should be apologizing,” I say quietly, blinking quickly to stall the flood. “I shouldn’t have run, and I-I can’t believe I was so awful to you. I should’ve been more understanding about where you were coming from. But instead, I took an already shitty situation and made it even shittier. I wasn’t even thinking about how you felt.”

His voice rolls over me like a babbling creek, smooth and soft and so unapologetically him. “You have nothing to apologize for. I should’ve been honest with you the moment I told you about Summit. I didn’t want you to find the ring like this. I was so ashamed that I wasn’t strong enough to get rid of it that I just…I just dragged everything out. And just because I was still grieving doesn’t give me an excuse to talk to you the way I did. ”

“But I understand why you did. It wasn’t from a place of malintent. If I hadn’t given you the impression that I wouldn’t understand your dilemma, you wouldn’t have withheld the truth from me. And then for me to accuse you of comparing us? That was wrong. God, it was so wrong.”

“I wasn’t trying to compare you. I wasn’t trying to make you feel like my second choice. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean.”

I can feel my face draw tight, a predecessor to the tears that spill down my cheeks like ichor from a cut vein. I’m doing everything in my power to stop them before they escalate into river rapids, and I hold back the hiccups that jostle my rib cage. “I-I know that. I said…I said things I didn’t mean too. I’m sorry, Bristol. I’m s-so sorry.”

He wastes no time in bridging the distance between us, enveloping me in another hug nourished by love. “Shh, angel. Shh. Just breathe with me. You don’t need to talk, okay? I know.”

“I know you don’t think of me as your second choice. I…I know that. I’m n-not going to let my insecurities ruin what we have.” My words are muffled against his shoulder, and I bunch my fists in the red, plaid cotton clinging to his back. He’s forking his fingers through my hair, cooing under his breath, squeezing me tighter to kill any last weed of doubt growing through the cracks in my mind.

“This isn’t all on you. My insecurities got in the way too. I’ve been so stuck in the past that I haven’t realized what an amazing future I have ahead of me. I don’t want to live in the past. I don’t want to feed this grief any longer. I’ve been ready to move on, but I’ve been too scared. I’ve been scared to lose the person that I was when I was with Summit. But you know what’s scarier than losing yourself, Lila? It’s losing the only person you love in this fucked-up world.”

I’m not sure I even heard him correctly through my obnoxious sniffling, but I pull back in surprise, my abject sadness perishing under the weight of one little word. That one little word saves me from an unrelenting rainfall, and it delivers me underneath a plum-contused sky where the stars are so bright and low-hanging that I can reach up and touch them. “What?”

A crescent of a smile upturns Bristol’s lips, and a blush blooms over his cheeks like watercolor dissolving in pink-tinted water. “I love you, Lila Perkins. I love you with everything I am. You may not have been my first love, but you’re my last love. And the thing about first loves is that they prepare you for your greatest love of all.”

Oh, God. Bristol loves me. He loves me, even after seeing how broken I am. He loves me, even after I said all those horrible things to him. All I’ve ever wanted is for someone to love me, and Bristol…Bristol’s the only person worthy of doing so.

Bristol Brenner has dismantled my defenses brick by brick, uncovering the fragile truth of my very being, and he’s only ever cradled that fledgling pain with loving arms. He’s the likeness of every mortal pleasure, cut from the beauty and transience of nature itself. He’s constructed his bones into a hearth made to stoke the fire of my love, and the vitality of his kiss is enough to imbue hope into those who have lost it.

He saved me. From myself.

“I love you, Bristol,” I bawl, losing his silhouette in my flushed vision. “Summit made you into the man you are today, and I’m grateful for her.”

I don’t know how long he holds me, but he never lets go—not even when I’m ruining his undershirt with snot and tears and spit. The percussion of hail beats against the car’s exterior, clashing with the guttural cries that rattle from deep within my belly. Bristol, as always, is the calm that grounds me, and he mops the moisture from the bruised bags under my eyes.

“You’re okay. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. And I’m so, so sorry that I haven’t done enough to make you think you’re worthy. Because you are. I’m the one who isn’t worthy of you. I’ll never be. But I promise to give you my all to make up for it,” he says with a buttress of reassurance.

With each smooth of his hand down my back, I feel the complementary love settle like sediment in my bones, and for the first time since I’ve been alive, the future’s not so scary to think about. I want to spend the rest of my life with Bristol. He’s the only person for me. He’s the only person I’ve ever loved.

It feels like I’ve waited eons to find my soulmate, and I know I said I didn’t believe in fate, but fate gave me a second chance when I wasn’t expecting it. The world knew I was hurting. The world knew Bristol was hurting. So, employing every omnipotent power in existence, it threw two grieving souls together in the hopes that they’d be able to heal each other.

I owe everything to Bristol. I wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for him. I wouldn’t be… happy …if it wasn’t for him.

I squeeze my eyes shut, letting the tears fall. “Thank you. For not giving up on me.” My voice is as brittle as frost, my limbs as frail as the naked stalks cowering underneath snow.

I lose my sense of time while I’m hugged against his chest, inhaling the leather and woodsy scent of him that now smells like home, the thrum of his heart lulling me into a weightless trance—a morse code that blares the extent of his love loud and clear. I’m not worried about getting out of here. I know I should be, but fear doesn’t exist when I’m with him. Not anymore.

“I’d never give up on you, angel. Not when you’re the reason I feel alive again.”

“I—” The single syllable wobbles on my tongue, somehow deafening in the stillness of the car.

“You don’t believe me?” He chuckles, eyes as dark as a riverbed, his thumb chasing a few of my wayward tears.

“I’ve never meant that much to anyone before,” I whisper shamefully. It feels like all this time my ribs have been a grave for my heart, keeping me content with a life lacking adventure and promise and love. But maybe that’s not my destiny.

“Good. I would’ve been way too jealous.”

I playfully thwap him on the arm. “Don’t make me laugh! I’m crying.”

He overwhelms me with another hug, using all his love and undying devotion to scare away the final traces of darkness that have outlived their rule.

“I don’t want just a long-term relationship with you, Lila. I want forever,” he confesses, and I don’t need to unscramble his words to decode the truth behind them.

Cobbled together by doubt and disbelief, my eyes burn like a dying star, more moisture anointing every inch of raw skin. “I’m a lot to handle for forever.” The shame fans out under a whisper—thick, heavy, indigestible.

“No, Lila. You’re the perfect amount. My life would be so boring if you didn’t constantly keep my ego in check,” Bristol assures me, and my belly does a little pirouette.

“You’re saying that you’re ready to spend the rest of your life dealing with my mood swings and hangry tantrums and stubbornness?”

“I don’t have to deal with them if they’re what I love about you.”

He’s really serious about this. I’m serious about this too. I’ll never need anyone’s validation ever again—not when I have it from the only person who matters. I spent my whole life holding myself to this impossible standard, criticizing how I looked, how I acted. And I didn’t realize how badly I needed help accepting myself until Bristol showed me that imperfections are worthy of love too. I never thought I’d spend forever with anyone, but now that it’s only a grasp away, I want it more than I’ve ever wanted fame or fortune. No A-list title holds a candle to being the winner of someone’s heart.

“What if you change your mind?” I ask, balling my hands against his back.

“I won’t, angel. My heart has already sprinted to the finish line.”